Introduction

Video game music can contain many different music genres and sounds. They can be orchestral, jazz, electronic and more. In my research I want to explore this musical ‘genre’. When playing games and listening to the music I could hear differences in the types of music that were played in games. Based on that I tried to make two distinct group of video games, of which I could compare the music of. These groups that I chose are triple-A and Indie games. These two groups are often used to distinct types of video games in the video game community. Indie games are characterised by a small group of developers without the financial support of a publisher. Triple-A games can be seen as the opposite of that, in which that they are characterised by a game developed and published by a mid-sized or major publisher. To put it in the context of film, Triple-A are analogous to blockbuster movies and indie games can be seen as independent movies. Because of this difference in financial support, one can imagine that there would be a difference in what kind of music are produced and put in the game. Among other things, one can hear that usually in Triple-A games, the music consists of orchestral pieces and other high-budget components, like choirs. Indie games on the other hand usually make use of sounds that are easily created by a computer like chiptune and midi. In recent developments, Triple-A games have aimed to have a higher sense of immersion. They tried to achieve this by simulating real life as much as they could, having life-like scenery and humanistic character models. This pursuit of realism has also been translated in its music.

(I also need to add a bit about the cinematic approach of music in Triple A games but haven’t been able to do that yet. But this is the reason why the genre film is seen in the graph under the header ‘visualizations’, as I wanted to see how video game music compare to film music)

Visualizations

In this graph I plotted valence against energy. You can see clear patterns emerging from the different genres. Noticeably when looking at the indie genre, a wide variety of music can be seen with both high and low energy and high and low valence, with a small saturation in the low energy and low valence corner in the bottom left.

This saturation is more prevalent in de triple-a and film genre. These genres do not have that much variety in their energy and valence levels. Especially in the triple-a genre one can notice that the top half of the graph is rather unpopulated when compared to the bottom half.

Chromagram